Visionary musicians at UC San Diego will perform this weekend, live in La Jolla, with musicians in Switzerland, Massachusetts and New York.The long-distance concert will be nearly in real-time.

Trombonist Michael Dessen and bassist Mark Dresser work together on music as they rehearse with musicians Ray Howard, Chris Howard, Min Xiao-Fen, and Sarah Weaver, shown on a screen, background, who are at Stony Brook University in New York, as they rehearse together by internet at UCSD in San Diego on Sunday.

Trombonist Michael Dessen and bassist Mark Dresser work together on music as they rehearse with musicians Ray Howard, Chris Howard, Min Xiao-Fen, and Sarah Weaver, shown on a screen, background, who are at Stony Brook University in New York, as they rehearse together by internet at UCSD in San Diego on Sunday.

When the Academy Awards was held in February at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, cutting-edge, fiber-optics technology enabled the orchestra for the live telecast to perform — in real time — from a studio a mile away at Captitol Records.

But that high-tech feat almost seems like child’s play compared to this weekend’s “Telematic Music Virtual Tour: A Reduced Carbon Footprint Concert Series.” It will feature internationally acclaimed jazz and new music bass great Mark Dresser and an all-star ensemble at UC San Diego performing with bands, in three other cities and time zones, on three successive days.

Each joint concert will be live and in nearly real time, even though the musicians in La Jolla will be playing (and improvising) in tandem with ensembles at universities in Amherst, MA (Friday), Zurich, Switzerland (Saturday) and Stony Brook, N.Y. (Sunday).

“At the Oscars, they were using remote cameras, microphones and networks to broadcast what was happening a mile away into a live hall,” Dresser, a UC San Diego professor (and alum), noted.

“What’s different about what we’re doing is that, instead of one band playing (remotely) for one live audience at a different location, we have two bands, playing together from two different places with two different live audiences each night. Each audience will be able to see and hear each band at the same time, even though we’re thousands of miles apart.”

This weekend’s Virtual Tour performances are the latest in a series of telematic concerts, in which elite groups of musicians around the globe perform from great distances together using high-definition audio and visual tehcnology. Because of the huge broadband-width networks required, such concerts typically can only be held at educational and research facilities.

“High-end consumer bandwidths people have at home might be 1.5 megabytes and some businesses might have 25 megabytes,” explained Dresser, who has been at the forefront of telematic concerts since 2007. “For there performances, we’re talking one billion bytes.”

On Monday afternoon, Dresser rehearsed with Dessen, as a UT-TV photographer filmed them.

The fact that Dresser was in La Jolla and Dessen was at UC Irvine seemed so minor, at least compared to the thousands of miles between the musicians who will perform during this weekend's Virtual Tour concerts, that La Jolla and Irvine seemed to almost be in the same room -- which, in a manner, they were.

Listening to each other intently, they negotiated a complex portion of a composition entitled "Nathan," and discussed whether one bar would be better if it was played in 11/8 or 5/6.

As Dresser bowed his bass part, he looked up at the large screen on which Dessen appeared: "Are you notating?"

"Yeah," replied the trombonist, who could be seen -- pen in hand -- quickly writing out a new note sequence.

A few minutes later, Dessen asked: "Do you hear how I'm playing it?"

Dresser nodded, then said: "If I play this pattern, do you want to blow (solo) over it?"

The two, who are the co-directors of this weekend's Virtual Tour, then launched into a lively duet. They were able to hear each other in close to real time, albeit with a tiny delay that will be a bit more audible when they perform Friday, Saturday and Sunday with musicians across the country and abroad.

At UC San Diego, Dresser and Dessen will be joined in person by pianist Myra Melford, a longtime musical partner of Dresser's, and by flutist Nicole Mitchell. The audience will hear and watch them interact with the musicians at other colleges in other cities, specifically Amherst College (Friday), Zurich's Institute of Computer Music and Technology (Saturday) and Stony Brook University's Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Consortium for Digital arts, Culture and Technology (Sunday).

"It's kind of like playing in a cathedral," Dresser said. "You adjust to the sound."

Visually, the delay between cities is more pronounced, although that doesn't really pose a problem.

"The music is so challenging to read and play that you can't really look up (at the screen)," noted leading San Diego jazz pianist Joshua White, who this week sat in for Melford during a rehearsal by the musicians in La Jolla and Zurich.

"The amount of rehearsal and preparation for these concerts is amazing. There's a technical director and crew in each of the three cities. And during rehearsals, they are constantly texting or calling each other to get everything in sync. It's incredible how much attention to detail is required to co-ordinate everything to make this work."

To add to the challenge, the 12 pieces that will be played during this weekend's three Virtual Concert performances have been specially composed for the concerts and will each be receiving their world premieres. The piece written by Zurich-based drummer Hemingway, who teaches most summers at the UC San Diego Jazz Camp, also utilizes a film and spoken narration.

The result, ultimately, is not a celebration of technology, per se. Rather, it's a demonstration of how technology can be used to enable visionary artists to revel in the joys of making truly interactive music together.

“This technology allows us to transcend location and to make music with people you have a real creative chemistry and affinity with,” Dresser said.

“You get to play with people at a distance, not to be novel, but to explore something special. There’s an intrinsic value in doing it. And it's very environmentally friendly!”